A Tense Morning in Cairo

In Cairo, plainclothes policemen and security officers are detaining journalists and confiscating their equipment, and bands of thugs or groups of neighborhood men, angry, are detaining and beating journalists who stray into their orbit. Mohamed, an Egyptian journalist I’ve been working with—he asked that his last name not be used—was held by the military until midnight. An officer took his I.D. and did not return it; they told him it was “too dangerous” to try and get home at that hour and he was taken in by a man living nearby. “I’ve got to go home and wash the blood out of my hair,” he told me when I spoke to him at around 8:30 A.M. Officials at the American embassy told me that they had been working the phones with very senior levels of the military, trying to get American journalists, from the New York Times and Washington Post to freelancers, released. Daniel Williams, a researcher for Human Rights Watch, who had been taken away when the offices of the Hisham Mubarak Centre were raided yesterday, was still missing. More reports came in of detentions, arrests, and harassment of foreigners and journalists, especially of photographers and cameramen. Shahira Amin, a senior correspondent and anchor for the government’s Nile TV, resigned in disgust after the station was told not to send reporters to Tahrir Square. The government line, broadcast on state television, alternates between presenting the demonstrators as destroying stability either as part of a Muslim Brotherhood plot or at the behest of foreign forces. Christiane Amanpour was held up by thugs for an hour on her way to the presidential palace (where she managed to interview President Hosni Mubarak); we heard that some journalists were arrested trying to get into the center of the city from the airport, having to spend all night camped out there.

The hostile atmosphere was increasingly unnerving. A French photographer called a colleague of mine to say that he and another French journalist had been arrested yesterday at lunchtime by two plainclothes police in a village about ten miles east of Alexandria. The policemen had said, “You are spies! What are you doing here?’” The journalists were driven to the local police station, which was full of about a hundred police officers, none wearing uniforms, all apparently quite confident, some playing soccer. They were then taken to the local governor’s office, which had been turned into a kind of military camp, and interrogated by a senior army officer before being released.

“They are back,” said the photographer, referring to the state-security apparatus, which, from the police up, has been largely absent for the past few days. “It reminds me of the last days of Saddam when plainclothes guys were picking up any foreigner and journalist they could find.”

Over the past twenty-four hours, the security forces—plainclothes police, interior-ministry security, and the Army—have been a greater, but still various and incoherent, presence. Cairo’s Corniche is totally blocked off to traffic now, and around the entrances to Tahrir Square the army has posted more soldiers who are helping protesters to check I.D.s and search people coming to the Friday rally, and have laid out lines of concertina razor wire in front of the makeshift barricades. A steady stream of people are arriving, the square is full and in fine voice, it’s half an hour until the midday Friday prayer, and nobody knows what will happen.